__________________
[SIZE="3"][FONT="Garamond"]Give a man a fire and he is warm for a day, set a man on fire and he is warm for the rest of his life:D[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE="4"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Join the Elves today and help us take over the world. pointy ears and elven fortress sold seperately[/FONT][/SIZE]
[IMG]http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/899/elvenub.png[/IMG]

First issue with dark elves is that you'll need to reskin the elves. Having done some modding before, I can tell you that any time you need new models or skins, that's what holds you up. Yes, there are some great artists out there, but they're few and far between, so getting their talent on board is tough!

To elaborate on what I said earlier, a unit is simply a text file with a special extension (.fus). Its animations, textures, sounds, etc are all just files that the text file points to (eg T.Texture[1]="Art/name"). Editing any of our units or adding new ones is a matter of editing or adding a text file with some LUA in it.

Creating a race is a matter of creating a new folder called 'MyRaceName' in the Unit folder and creating some units in there, then adding a few things to point to that race in the interface files (almost all of our interface is just LUA code in text files, you can completely change our interface to be, say, a first-person x-wing view [random star-wars mod thought]).

I figured something like that, but there is still the fact as mentioned above, creating unit skins isn't exactly something you can just whip up, it takes a lot of work! (unless you live in photoshop, which I don't)

Can you make total conversions taking out original races and if you had two would you have to uninstall one to load the other or is there a mods folder and a program to let you choose which one you want to load

__________________
[SIZE="3"][FONT="Garamond"]Give a man a fire and he is warm for a day, set a man on fire and he is warm for the rest of his life:D[/FONT][/SIZE]
[SIZE="4"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Join the Elves today and help us take over the world. pointy ears and elven fortress sold seperately[/FONT][/SIZE]
[IMG]http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/899/elvenub.png[/IMG]

I figured something like that, but there is still the fact as mentioned above, creating unit skins isn't exactly something you can just whip up, it takes a lot of work! (unless you live in photoshop, which I don't)

you mean texture, skin is the mesh envelopes in the model, made with 3ds max.

there are mutiple steps for creating a new unit:

Modeling object in 3ds max

UVW mapping / texturing -- using photoshop to create a .dds then layering it onto the unit aranging every single face of the model,, if you have over 300 faces,,, well thats several hours of work not even including creating the texture!

Creating blip or bone skeleton and staging them inside the mesh of the new unit, adjusting all the limit angles of the bones (Elbows can not invert and rotate backwards right?)

A skin modifier or commonly known as "Rigging" must be applied, it works with the blip or skeleton of the unit to grab each and every poly of the mesh; just like our flesh is attached to our bones. The influence of each and every poly must be adjusted perfectly (if you lift your arm, is your right toe forced to lift right up with it? No.).

Now will the finished model and it's rigged you need to animate it via blip/bones.

Using the bones to create keyframe animations you bring your new unit to life; this is when you can have your new unit pick his nose and scratch his butt at the same time.

Next is using dof's exporter to export your mesh and animations to files the game can understand.

The exported animations and meshes are then opened with our model viewer which helps us set various things such as default unit scale, animation time and most importantly animation events which tells the game engine what to do on that animation, such as when a sword should 'hit' and cause damage on what frame in the animation(Why wound you get damaged from a sword hit if he's still preparing to swing the sword at you?).

Next is to Create the main unit file which links all of the animations and their file locations, unit properties, abilities, and all functions required basic and advanced, most of this is already done with our current 'Proto' System which sets up 'default' function actions in an undetermined coding environment.

Your unit should be available in the game if everything is error-less, if you made an error, the game will tell you where the error is caused.

You can then adjust some other files for your unit, creation small icons for your unit on the hud, his abilities and his production button.

You can then add a production button to another building/object/unit or what ever you want to do with the Icon etc. you can do pretty much anything.

You want your new unit to rain down out of the sky in a large meteor? Well, create the meteor object, create tons of cool effects, make it as a projectile, then create a new object to shoot the projectile from the sky on a location way down below,,, on projectile hit spawn your unit. Bang, you got yourself a kickass new wizard ability: "Mentor Minions"